271–280 of 965 posts
Nothing seems out of the ordinary in terms of costs. But there some features that would be pertinent to their core mission of providing a secure messenger, and stories and payments aren’t some of those. Stories button takes up half of the bottom navigation bar, I have not seen anyone using that feature. Their non-product approach is what prevents men from becoming a recurring donors. They are finally testing a build…
Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. * 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alon…
- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.
Actually it does usually. Because when people see real meaning in their work, as opposed to find yet another way to manipulate people on other peoples behalf, then you don't have to buy their consciousness as well.
So sure, it is awesome, that signals employers get to have meaning and money. But I would bet, you would find competent people working for less. (And maybe somewhere else)
But .. they do have a working app and organisation right now and drastic changes could destroy that.
> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year. > Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year. > Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year. > Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year. > Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.
SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use…
As for registration fees, it sounds like they should use authenticator instead of SMS... and stop requiring a phone number to sign up. That is why I left Signal (went with Matrix). I don't see why anyone would want to tie their Signal to a phone. If you value privacy, why would you do that?
Servers cost seems excessive as well. I don't believe you need that many servers, even if you served a boat load of requests.
As for bandwidth.. okay, that may be the case. I am not sure how you can get that cost down.
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You can't send an sms yourself like you can an email. Instead of setting up a server, you have to work with a telco provider (an aggregator specifically). Any SMS service eventually hands off to one of these. Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. They charge insane fees because they can, that is all there is to it. Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a pro…
Maybe they should flip it on its head - get a thousand? Ten thousand? numbers that can accept SMS and tell people to "text 473843 to this number" to verify.
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What did WhatsApp win? I've never used it, so I'm not sure what anyone uses it for.
In South America it's the standard messaging everyone uses, even businesses. No one uses SMS
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> stubbornly use iMessange. Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth… And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use .
If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.
(And even Google doesn’t really have any love for RCS, they crawled back to it as a fallback plan with their tail between their legs when their own proprietary lock-in messaging apps didn’t work out. Which makes their attempts to shame Apple into adopting it pretty hilariously disingenuous.)
Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.